Like many glassworks of Murano, the Vetreria Artistica Barovier was affected by the economic crisis of 1929. Its dissolution in the early 1930s gave rise to two new companies destined to leave a lasting mark on 20th-century glass production : Barovier & Toso and Seguso Vetri d’Arte.
After the disappearance of Vetreria Artistica Barovier, the brothers Ercole and Niccolò Barovier, co-founders of the company, founded Vetreria Barovier. The experience was short-lived: the company was absorbed by Ferro Toso, owner of S.A.I.A.R. (Società Anonima Italiana Arti Riunite), which merged the companies in 1937 to form Ferro Toso Barovier & Co, and then Barovier & Toso in 1942.
Within this house, Ercole Barovier (1889-1974) managed the administration and artistic direction until 1972. Under his guidance, the company became one of the few Murano glassworks to never use outside designers. His thorough knowledge of raw materials allowed him to develop, for more than forty years, models suited to changing tastes.
Already in the late 1920s, he developed Primavera glass, characterized by its internal cracks. Between the 1930s and 1950s, he experimented with metallic oxides to color the glass in bulk (Lenti, Crépuscolo series) or on the surface (Barbarico, Neolitico series). From the 1950s onwards, he composed decorations from glass sheets and rods that had been previously worked and fused with a blowtorch, creating endless geometric patterns, as in the Dorico, Diamantato, and Intarsio series.
At the same time, former employees of Vetreria Artistica Barovier — including Antonio Seguso and his sons Ernesto and Archimede, Napoleone Barovier, and Luigi Olimpio Ferro — founded the glassworks Barovier Seguso & Ferro in 1933. From 1934, the designer Flavio Poli (1900-1984) joined the company and became its artistic director in 1937, during its transformation into Seguso Vetri d’Arte.
After beginnings still close to contemporary productions (Pulegoso, 1933; Laguna and Pesco, 1936; Corroso, 1939), he developed, at the end of the 1930s, an innovative research based on the superposition of layers of colored and transparent glass. This technique gave rise to the famous "sommerso" glasses (Sommerso, Valva), which enjoyed great success in the 1950s, notably with the remarkable Valva Siderale series (1952). After his departure in 1963, the artistic direction was entrusted to Mario Pinzoni (1927-1993).